norrius

> But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea."

This is a confusion specific to the English language, not consciousness in general. Some languages distinguish between the past-oriented cause-why and the future-oriented goal-why explicitly (e.g. Russian: почему vs зачем).

> I can rotate a die in my minds eye without actually seeing it. It's hard to explain.

I think I'm the same. It's as if I can imagine a geometry, but it doesn't have any texture or colour. It's not black, not grey, not brown... It's a shape in its pure form, maybe like a wireframe, without a physical manifestation.

However, I can imagine music and actually hear it. I had this a couple of times where I "replay" a song in a foreign language I've heard a long time ago, and this time I can parse out more lyrics than before. All inside my head.

What is the "smallest positive number" in the set {x | x in reals and 0 < x < 1}?

Sure, if you want to allow non-flat, curved faces, this body is possible. I'd argue this is not in the spirit of the question, similar to the triangle statue mentioned in the article.

I come from a country with rather _interesting_ views on what should be allowed online. 451 is used often enough that I've seen it in the wild more than once (and consider yourself lucky if you haven't encountered it...).

I suspect this is more about giving that almost-boiling water more points where it can break tension and start forming bubbles. So it doesn't make the water reach 100° faster but makes it more visible.

Can someone explain what prevents birds of the same subtype from mating? The article mentions that the chromosome 2 cannot cross over in meiosis, but I just fail to understand the mechanics of the process and how that leads to disassortativity.

> Getting a bank in most other countries is not hard at all and certainly not a "nightmare."

I don't know about "most" countries, but my American colleagues in Germany and Switzerland complained about the difficulty of doing anything related to finance (banks, brokers, taxes) because of their extra tax liability. I personally had to sign quite a few forms certifying that I am not a US citizen or a greencard holder or in any other way tax liable in the US, so it does seem to be a big deal.

> So it broke the experience for all first time users.

To be fair, Python 3 provides a very clear error message if you try to use print as a statement, although I don't know when exactly that was added:

    $ echo 'print "Hello World"' > test.py && python3 test.py
      File "test.py", line 1
        print "Hello World"
                          ^
    SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello World")?

I think the choice of an object in this comparison is interesting, altough it doesn't affect the result that much, of course. The 5-franc coin is ridiculously big: measuring 31.45 mm (1.24 inch) in diameter and weighing 13.2 g, it's one of the largest circulating coins in the world.

That reminds me of a story where a student couldn't figure out the properties of some physical system, so he ran a massive simulation of a universe with laws of physics similar to his own (but, of course, cutting corners whenever possible). This universe eventually produced a life form intelligent enough to figure out the necessary equations, at which point he happily copied them to his homework and forgot about the simulation.

...only to find it days later (= billions of years of simulated time), by which point the simulated life had figured out that their universe was written hastily and its laws were full of subtle bugs, like floating-point rounding errors showing up in physical measurements. Their technological advance let them move stars around, which they grumpily arranged in a message saying "your code sucks".

Can't find it at the moment, does anyone recognise the reference? It could be in one of these books, I suppose, but I don't have them.